


This Disconnected Time

by climaxitis (orphan_account)



Category: Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu | Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:26:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4687205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/climaxitis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She isn’t sure of what she hates more: the way this silence overwhelms her so, or the reminder that it doesn’t last forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Disconnected Time

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to me, and also a bunch of very tolerant people on tumblr.

The guest room he’s reserved for her is at the far end of the second story, three doors away from the staircase. It’s simple, modest, decorated in dull shades of brown and beige. There is a dry, impersonal air to its immaculacy that suggests she is the first person to live here in some time, and it is something her presence does nothing to dissolve.

There is a small bed beside the window, big enough for one, and the sheets are new, because he’s had them changed, perhaps yesterday, or perhaps the day before. In the corner opposite it stands a dresser, made of polished wood, and she has to try twice to brush off all the dust gathered on the empty shelves before she even considers folding her coat there.

The curtains are sheer, pallid, but the drapes covering them are velvet blue. They hang heavily over the cut-glass window, shadows shifting languidly like ghosts in the golden glow of the bedside lamp. In the morning, when she remembers to, Elfriede draws the drapes open, lets the day filter in fragments past the lace webbing and into the dim room, a sign that time still does move in a place that never changes.

Sometimes, she wakes early, and those mornings, she lays spread and still on the bed, her eyes taking in the sunrise as it spills inside, spreading pink and red light into the room. For a moment, the brightness of it is overwhelming, as if it will swallow her entirely in its brilliance, and she counts the seconds until the burning colors dissipate, until all that remains is pure, radiant white, before she closes her eyes, faces away the light, and abandons herself to sleep again.

* * *

The soles of her shoes are dirty with dried mud and the left heel is chipped, but they’re unscathed otherwise, and when she clacks them across the marble floor the sound echoes out in the vacant hallway, sharp and terse and purposefully rude. She’s made it a habit to take the long route to her room every night. It’s comforting somehow, just strolling past wide corridors and identical locked doors, and when Elfriede tells herself it’s because she likes pretend she’s all alone, it’s only half-true.

It’s past midnight by the time she tires, and feet are horribly sore when she takes off her shoes, observing the red welts left along her skin, looking as though they threaten to rupture at the slightest pressure. She knows they’ll continue to hurt well into the morning, but it’s not as if she minds, not really. It’s the sort of pain she can appreciate, even, and, as with everything else, she teaches herself to grow used to it.

* * *

Elfriede wakes slowly, to the departing sound of footsteps and the shutting click of a door. It’s early, and the sun hasn’t even come up yet, but the windows are already opened, and, she realizes with a quick glance outside, it’s the only confirmation she needs to know this isn’t where she’s supposed to be.

The mattress creaks from under her when she shifts and pulls herself up, dizzily, betraying the insistent sense of weightlessness in her body. Her limbs are awkward and sticky when the tries to move them, as if she is not quite certain they are still her own, and her bare legs twitch in discomfort as she parts them under the sheets. She feels lightheaded, and worn out, too, despite the hours of sleep, lingering insistently and like mist in the back of her mind, tempting her to lie back down, cover herself with the mussed sheets, and just stay there.

For a moment, she’s almost convinced to do just that. She doesn’t, in the end – but only because she knows it wouldn’t be worth the self-infliction.

An easy tug of her hand and the blue linen is quickly tossed off the bed, joining the hasty, crumpled mess of clothes and undergarments as it falls into a heap somewhere on the floor. The misery of the sight isn’t lost on her, despite her best attempts; Elfriede stills with her gaze paused beside the bed, seized by momentary revulsion in all the second it takes for her to convince herself it’s solely for the sake of his inconvenience that she doesn’t bother with tidying up after herself anymore.

Outside, the morning is young, and the first rays of day start to fill the room with warm specks of light. The window in his room is bigger than the one in the guests’. It faces the front lawn, just one story below, and if she peers out of it, she can see his car parked behind the unlocked gate, waiting to depart. She doesn’t. Elfriede’s hands stay on her lap, bare and pale like the rest of her, and they remain still, even when she hears the car engine thrum down below, followed by a sudden, quick skidding of rubber, first against concrete, then asphalt. She hears the sounds, growing more and more in distance, until, eventually, they cease altogether – and she is ashamed to acknowledge the wave of relief that washes over her when everything finally falls into complete silence.

Elfriede rises, nears the window, and, just in time to catch him driving around a corner, pulls the curtains shut. She hopes he sees her. She hopes he doesn’t.

She can never tell with him.

* * *

She feels the urge to slam his doors on the way out, but there is no audience to her rudeness, and all she’s going to accomplish from the act is a hollow echo, from the brief, harsh impact of locks against jambs, and even if she imagines the racket would be lovely, in the end she decides to simply leave them wide open. The room looks smaller from the outside, somehow; the exposed doorway reminds her of a mouth, eager to swallow her whole.

How fitting, Elfriede thinks, and doesn’t help the smile spreading across her face, small and still and humorless.

* * *

The bathroom quarters in the guest room is far less spacious than the one in his, she knows, but the idea is not something she’s willing to entertain. Even for her parameters, it wouldn’t be worth it. Especially not, she figures, after last time.

Her memory about it is hazy at best, which Elfriede is frankly thankful for; her recollections remain vague enough to not prod into the details, and it’s not as if she cares much about them in the first place. Not really. Everything tends to blur more and more the longer she stays here; days, nights, languidly blending together in their identical listlessness. Most of the time, there isn’t anything worth committing to memory. She wonders if the stains are still there.

The second story hallways are silent witnesses she briskly walks past as she heads for the guest room. It’s well into the morning; the sun’s glare outside the wide glass windows is harsh and pale, and the light almost stings when it catches onto her bare skin, outlining the exhaustion written on her face. Elfriede brings her fingers up to rub at her temple, and nurses the dull, expectant throb of a growing headache. Then, down to her throat, tracing slow, methodical circles where bile bubbles underneath.

It’s been worsening these days, she notices, the nausea. As with everything else, she’s taught herself to accustom to it, but it’s not as if it means she has to like it, too.

* * *

She might have been granted the luxury of her own room, but the keys to it are as much his as everything else in the house is. The fact that he hasn’t taken advantage of it does nothing to ease the knowledge that he could, if he wanted to – if he only cared enough to. It’s an insulting thought, for her to inspire mercy in him, and Elfriede supposes he knows, because when it all comes down to it, that’s probably the reason why he hasn’t.

It’s not something worth being thankful for – so she isn’t.

* * *

The metal handle turns in her palm with a dry click and Elfriede steps inside, closing the door behind her, entering with as much ease as he could (as he had).

There is a small bed beside the open window, big enough for one, and the sheets are clean, crisp, because he’s had them replaced already, she’s certain. In the corner opposite the bed stands a dresser, made of polished wood, with a small stack of dresses piled on one of the shelves, soft and folded and new. The room has been cleaned; everything here is washed out and stripped of irregularities, of her presence, and of his, too.

It feels as if nobody’s been here in weeks. A part of her wants to believe it’s true.

* * *

She stands under the shower with her eyes casted down to her toes as she reaches to turn on the faucet. The bathroom floor is white beneath her feet, unlike his blue-tinted one, and under the yellow lightbulb, her reflection on the marble is pale and almost sickly. There are no marks on the tiles, and Elfriede doesn’t know why she expects to see any in the first place, or why she keeps looking. It’s a given that he’d be far too careful to let that happen.

The water is frigid for the first few seconds before the temperature climbs up to a familiar and unpleasant degree. It’s scalding, as if she’s being stabbed at all over by tiny pinpricks, but she doesn’t mind how the hot steam rises up and fills the room, shielding her with thin, heated wisps of white.

Her whole body starts to blotch with pink, soon enough. Elfriede has come to hate the color on her. Pink is honest, girlish, and, most of all, reveals too much. It makes her look too vulnerable, too exposed, and betrays all the spite she tries to gather in her eyes when she strains to glare up from beneath him.

She reaches for the soap, scrubbing herself raw for minutes, until the running water turns tepid and she’s left shivering under it. She hates, and hates, and still in the end she can’t wash her thoughts away.

* * *

Elfriede holds the dress up against her and clutches onto its shoulders. The double in the mirror stares back at her for an overlong moment, and as it’s as if she’s searching for consolation in the way the article hangs, loose and suspended by her fingers, without a figure to fill.

She slips inside it and lets the skirt drape loose around her legs. The fabric is smooth, soft cotton, and it yields effortlessly against the curves of her body, from the dip of her waist, the jut of her shoulder blades, to the exposed space between her neck and chest worth calling scandalous.

It’s a pretty dress, with lace bordering the neckline, a ruffled hem teasing politely at her ankles. It’s pretty, demure, and she supposes it might’ve suited her, once, a younger girl whose skin she grew out of too early and too late at the same time. Or perhaps, a slightly older girl who was promised a future and waited for it – but, for what it’s worth, in this moment, she thinks it suits her just as well.

Elfriede isn’t sure what kind of woman this makes her. Maybe she’d rather not know. She wonders what he might have to say about that.

Her tired gaze doesn’t part from her reflection, and for a moment, only that moment, she doesn’t think of him, of his cruelty, his show of compassion, or anything at all. When her peace is eventually broken, as she expects it ought to, the stillness of her expression doesn’t change, but it’s only because she knows he would have mocked her without mercy if she couldn’t at least manage that.

* * *

Breakfast is already served, like clockwork, by the time she descends down the staircase, the sound of her heels muffled by the carpet.

The refrigerator is nearly empty, but it’s a given; it’s been that way since two weeks ago, she estimates, give or take. It’s been that way since the day she’d poured all the milk down the sink and shattered a carton’s worth of eggs against the kitchen counter, watching the yolk drip down the ceramic tiles and onto the floor, pooling stickily around her bare feet – after she’d spent the remainder of the morning cutting up vegetables and wadded up loaves of bread and left all them to fester together on the floor. He’d given up on staying for breakfast soon after that incident.

That’s too bad, Elfriede thinks, her lack of regret unrepentant, and lazily cuts up the slices of toast that have been left to cool on the plate for too long. The handle is carved wood and the blade shines a silvery gray in the white kitchen, but the edge is far too dull and ineffective to cut through skin, let alone muscle. Not that she’s tried. She’d immediately discarded the possibility the first time she’d held the knife in her hand.

The bottom left drawer of his kitchen cabinet has been locked for at least three weeks, but she supposes it’s fair to take precautions.

The toasts are stiff, burnt at the edges, and lathered in browned butter. She knows she’s had much worse, but they’re easily the most unappealing things she’s ever seen – if only for the knowledge of who she owes them to. For what it’s worth, though, the scrambled eggs set on the side of the plate fares better than the ones she had days ago, even if not by much.

Elfriede chews her meal in silence, elbows against the tablecloth and gaze flat on one of the many unoccupied seats across from her. She feels humiliated, and ashamed, too, every time she returns here, but, as with most everything else, she has learned to grow used to these emotions. She’s learned to suppress them rather well, too – so the closest thing to an acknowledgement she’s ever going to give him is in the form of a wry, clipped thought: _how kind of you to not let me starve_.

She always stops there. She doesn’t add, _this is the least you could do_ , or _it’s nice to know you’re returning the favor –_ because the only thing more insulting to her than the knowledge of being indebted to a man like him is the knowledge of having done something worth making him be indebted to _her_.

* * *

Besides, Elfriede considers, as she passes the hall between the kitchen and the living room, if he’d truly wanted to kill her, he has much more practical methods at his disposal than something as medieval as malnutrition. There’s an impersonal sort of ruthlessness in his standard, soldier-issued firearm, a clean and straight shot to the heart she predicts he’d favor, but at the same time, she thinks he’d be the kind of person who’d be able to appreciate the elegance a competent rope around the neck could afford.

In any case, she concludes dryly, there are still so many more ways he could hurt her without having to resort to murder. She doubts he has to come to that end – it’ll just ruin his own amusement in the long run – but the thought is far less comforting than she thinks it should be.

* * *

The living room, as with the rest of his house, is too big for just one person. This is something Elfriede had noted immediately, the first time she’d entered it – despite her struggling preoccupation with the hand pinning her wrists behind her – and it is something that only becomes more readily apparent with each visit she takes to it.

If it were anyone else’s house but his, she’d have the decency to feel bashful, for the intrusion, or perhaps pity, for how lonely it must feel, living like this.

The furniture is elegantly picked, arranged carefully in such a particular way which suggests neither warm hospitality nor professional distance. The couch is well-made, far from worn – her stomach still clenches when the cushion shifts under her weight – and the only thing placed on the glass table before it is a ceramic vase that looks plain compared to the arrangement of flowers it houses.

Roses, yellow and vibrant, prickling thorns concealed behind dainty petals and leaves.

They’re beautiful, a stark contrast to the rest of the room, and Elfriede picks out one rose from the bunch, holding it up absently against the sunlight. The blossoms look fresh, and, as she notices with slight surprise, they’re still wet, too. Someone’s bothered to water them. She hadn’t seen the bouquet, the last time she’d come down here, and she can’t help wonder, as she places the rose back, who it might be from.

A woman, her instinct tells her – a woman who favors bright yellow instead of red. She isn’t sure what to make of this supposition, or why she feels the inclination to know.

The skin of her right thumb stings, then, a sharp, sudden jolt of a sensation, and in the momentary daze it takes a moment for Elfriede to realize she’s pricked herself on one of the stray thorns. She’s too late to pull away her hand, and she freezes, watches the blood drip from the puncture wound and onto the flowers, blooming bright red spots over the golden petals.

It takes seconds before she starts breathing again. It takes longer for her to open her eyes – and when she does, she feels them grow damp and hot.

His living room is quiet, empty of witnesses, and when Elfriede allows herself to cry for perhaps the first time in weeks, she buries her face in the palms of her hands, an unnecessary show of shame. Her mind turns white and the tears fall in time with choked sobs and hiccups; she only stops shaking when the heavy pang in her chest has dissolved completely, leaving it a hollow space, as if nothing had ever been there.

Nothing at all.

* * *

Elfriede wakes slowly, to the cool rush of an afternoon breeze through the half-shut window and the steady, methodical ticking of the clock hung on the wall. A brief glance at it confirms that the time is two-thirty. The lunch would have already been cold by now, she figures, with mild disappointment, but her lack of appetite pays it no mind. Outside, the air has cooled by degrees, and the clouds are low and rumbling as they hang above the trees lined up beside the bleak gray streets. Will it rain, soon?

She doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep, and she fails to recall when she got upstairs to the room, but the memory of her accident is ever fresh, and as she pictures the ruined bouquet, her bleeding finger and wet eyes, Elfriede almost expects to start crying again – and all without even knowing the reason why.

She doesn’t, thankfully, and instead turns, lying on her side, and for a very long time remains very still on the bed. She’s closed her eyes, and if she tries, hard, she can pick up the clock’s mechanical noises, the subtle movement of its hands. The sound is soothing, somehow, and it fills up the silence in the room, the extending hallways, resting in the hollow of her thoughts. The back of her head is throbbing again – a constant, aching pulse she can’t quite pinpoint – and this time, she doesn’t try to rub circles at it.

It’s always so quiet in the day, while he’s gone, and sometimes Elfriede isn’t sure of what she hates more: the way this silence overwhelms her so, or the reminder that it doesn’t last forever.

* * *

The next time she wakes, it is four in the afternoon, and it has started raining, a pouring drizzle so gentle it’s almost invisible. Elfriede’s first instinct is to rush over and shut the window and curtains, but not the drapes. Water thrums and murmurs dully against the glass, dripping down in wet, indistinct lines, blurring the edges of the scenery she can barely see through the gaps in the lace. But it doesn’t take long before the rain grows heavier, pounds harder onto the roof and windows, and it’s at the first clap of thunder that she pulls the drapes shut – she’s never liked the sound of a storm very much.

It’s chilly in his house, even with all the doors and windows closed, so she decides she’ll wear her old coat again today. The creases haven’t been ironed out of it yet, she notices as she runs her fingers down the material, but the dark red fabric helps disguise the stains somewhat – which Elfriede supposes is fortunate, because she doubts it’s possible to remove them anymore. She doesn’t know why, but she thinks she’s quite fond of the way it looks now, despite all, half-crumpled and slightly tattered at the seams. It’s always suited its owner rather well. That’s why she likes it best.

The cloth is thick and warm and comfortingly familiar, and there’s a certain sense of nostalgia piercing relentlessly at her as she puts it on. It makes Elfriede think, distantly, of afternoons spent beside the fireplace, many winters past, and for a second, she even allows herself to savor the imagery – but then she is taken back to a misty night, the barred metal gates of his house, the clatter of a knife dropping to the ground.

She doesn’t know why she’s startled. As with everything else she has brought here, that, too, has been sullied – whether by one way or the other. He has many, after all.

* * *

Elfriede heats the kettle and searches his sparse kitchen cabinet for a teapot and cup. She rummages for the particular ones he’d used the last time he brewed tea, a painted porcelain pot with a cracked lid and a matching cup that’s chipped on the side of its rim. They’re lovely, and they look expensive, despite the damage, but that’s not the reason why she chooses them.

There was another cup in this set, she recalls. Elfriede can remember it clearly: the quick swing of the ceramic out of her hand, the pleasant shattering that soon followed. He hadn’t dodged, but she’d wavered all the same, and missed his head by a precious inch. A particularly large fragment bounced off the hard plaster and landed onto the puddle forming stickily around the heel of his shoes.

He didn’t react, didn’t even follow her retreat upstairs, but it’s not as if she’d expected him to.

Elfriede sets the teacup down and takes her own serving in solitude, seated on one of the chairs placed near the large glass windows. She presses her side flush against the wooden sill, hearing the storm’s violent rumbling muffled pleasantly through the velvet cloth.

The tea is boiling hot, and she sips the blend slowly, the way she’d been taught to, careful not to let it scald her lips. It’s sweet, because there’s too much sugar, and when she runs her tongue over the roof of her mouth, the stickiness that clings to the concavity is familiar somehow. It makes her think of something distant, something she can’t exactly place, and Elfriede knows it’s for the better, but she still feels saddened when she finds herself unable to remember what it is.

* * *

The ticking clock in the room reads six-three; outside, behind all the clouds, she thinks the sun must have set already. Elfriede finds herself seated on the guest room’s bed with her legs pulled up to her chest, the skirt of her dress rising to tease at the line of her calf.

Six thirty-five.

She cradles her face in her knees and listens to the dull unending noise of water thrumming against glass, repeated the same way she keeps telling herself the same thing, over and over again, until the sentence fragments into words that have lost their meaning, until they too break down into letters, one after another after another.

Six thirty-six. Less than four hours left, she thinks – but it’s not as if she’s counting.

* * *

She forgoes dinner, in the end. She’s showered already, and her stomach is aching horribly, a stabbing feeling she can’t quite place, isn’t quite certain has anything to do with hunger at all.

* * *

The doorway is still gaping and wide, a monster’s mouth with its teeth unbarred. She steps inside and softly closes the door behind her.

* * *

She’d taken off her coat, first, already placed it back in its drawer in the guest room, but after a moment of consideration, standing at the foot of his bed, Elfriede decides she’ll have to do away with the dress, too. The act is methodical: she makes quick work of the zipper, and it slides with ease past her shoulders, tumbling into a pool of red and black around her ankles. She chooses to fold it on the bedside table, instead of leaving it on the floor with the others, but only because it’s hers, and not because she’s aware of how miserable it would look, strewn about like that. Her fingers reach around her neck, feeling for the metal latch of her choker, and she places it on top of her dress, gently, carefully, so it doesn’t wobble too much against the fabric. The camisole – white, pulled by its straps over her head – comes off last, but she doesn’t bother picking it up off the floor.

The rain hasn’t stopped pouring; the cold is more merciless than ever, and she brings her hands to cup at her elbows, forearms circled around her chest in what could pass off as a halfhearted pretense of decency.

Elfriede sits, unmoving, on the edge of the unmade bed, her feet pressed onto the linoleum, and then throws herself backwards on the mattress, sprawling her legs under the wrinkled covers she’s pulled up from the floor and over herself. Her gaze is intent on the ceiling, and she studies the darkened corners, searching for where the paint has started to chip.

She doesn’t think she’ll sleep for long.

* * *

Elfriede wakes slowly, to the steady, advancing sound of footsteps and the opening click of a door. It’s dark, outside, and through all the water, she can barely see the moon, a fading shimmer of white reflected in her half-lidded eyes.

The light pouring from the hallway is sudden, harsher than she thinks it should be, and she doesn’t flinch, but she still feels her skin prickle with the wrong kind of warmth, an uncomfortable trill of something restless and expectant. It doesn’t feel any less sickening now than it had the second time, or the third, or the tenth, or any more after that, because she’s stopped counting, and she’d expected better from herself, really, expected her to ease herself and grow numb to this – this fear, this _reaction –_ the way she has with most everything else, and even if the closest thing she’s ever come to accomplishing that is by pretending that she already has, she’s trying, isn’t she, and it should at least count for something, anything at all.

His footsteps halt at the same time as her breath, and she glances away from the window, the air trapped partway in her throat. He looks surprised. Elfriede can’t even smile.

* * *

“The rain’s finally stopped,” Elfriede murmurs, and spares a distracted glance over his shoulder, looking outside the still-dripping window.

The moon doesn’t look as lonely now, with all the stars flickering to life all around it, but the sky is still misty, still cool, and she wants to open the window of his room, letting the scent of after-rain inside. She wants to breathe in the dampness of grass and dirt, instead of the air inside the room, warm and heavy and stifling, clinging onto her like an unwanted second skin. Like a reminder.

The whole room is glowing with yellow and their strangled voices have long died down into silence, a stillness she can no longer find reassurance in, and Elfriede leans back against the pillow and curls closer into herself, edging away to her side of the bed. Her dress is still within the corner of her eye, within arms’ distance, still folded and neat, and against her better judgment, she doesn’t reach for it. She must hate herself more than she thinks.

Sleep comes late.

**Author's Note:**

> R/E domesticity is real and I'm still hung up on it.


End file.
